A web browser is commonly used with computational devices, such as laptops, smartphones, tablet computing devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. Web browsers continue to grow in popularity as a tool used to access a particular web page, and perform related features. It is common for a user's homepage to include customized user settings, such as a default web page, and other sources of information. For example, customized web pages may include local weather, email, text messaging, horoscopes, video plug-ins, backgrounds, etc.
Currently, web browsers use a tab metaphor to represent a browser context presently running within the browser. A web browser may have multiple browser contexts running at any given time. Any of the browser contexts may be selected for display via their respective tabs. Each tab is associated with a corresponding uniform resource locator (URL) field that includes a web address. Also, some additional tools or buttons may be present allowing the user to navigate backward and forward between the various browser contexts. Each tab can be selected at any time providing the user with the option to switch to a different browser context.
On mobile devices, the tab metaphor cannot be used to represent browsing contexts because the screen real estate is not large enough. Within the display area of a mobile device, tabs would occupy a large portion of the screen and would not scale very well horizontally as the number of tabs increases. Tabs would also be more difficult to select given the imprecision inherent to small screen touch-based user interfaces.